Associate Director, Data Engineering; Media Agency

Company description

Spark Foundry was built during the most transformative time in the history of advertising and marketing. We deliver everything a traditional media agency has to offer and have grown into one of the world’s most successful agencies by helping brands evolve their marketing by leveraging identity, commerce, artificial intelligence, and more to connect with people. Transformation is part of our DNA.

Spark Foundry’s start-up spirit delivers high-touch approaches and a never-ending desire to challenge the status quo. Combined with Publicis Media’s powerhouse soul leveraging connected data assets, advanced AI applications, and investment clout, we “Bring HEAT to Brands.” No other agency possesses the expertise that we do to address today’s most pressing challenges to drive business transformation through media.

Associate Director, ML & AI is a senior, hands‑on engineering leader responsible for driving the design, development, and delivery of scalable ML & AI solutions. This role will own the technical direction of priority initiatives, establish engineering standards, and ensure high‑quality execution across data engineering and AI/ML use cases. You’ll build GenAI‑first solutions (LLM‑powered assistants, insight synthesis, workflow automation) alongside traditional ML systems (forecasting, optimization, recommendations).

This is a hands‑on, product‑focused role for someone who ships production systems not research prototypes.

Associate Director will work closely with analytics and media teams to translate business requirements into robust technical solutions. This role is ideal for someone who enjoys building from scratch, setting direction, and unblocking teams
, while remaining deeply involved in hands‑on development.

• Own the technical design and architecture for GenAI and ML solutions end to end
• Define standards for LLM usage, RAG patterns, evaluation, and production readiness
• Make architectural tradeoffs across scalability, cost, latency, and model quality
• Ensure GenAI solutions are secure, observable, and built for real‑world use
• Lead development of GenAI applications, including LLM workflows, RAG pipelines, and inference services
• Build and optimize data pipelines and feature workflows to support GenAI and traditional ML use cases
• Develop production‑grade APIs and backend services using cloud‑native and distributed systems
• Troubleshoot complex issues across data quality, retrieval accuracy, model behavior, and system performance
• Drive priority AI initiatives from concept through production deployment
• Break down ambiguous problems into clear technical tasks, milestones, and MVPs
• Own delivery timelines, dependencies, and technical risk management
• Partner with stakeholders to balance speed, scope, and long‑term maintainability
• Serve as the primary technical point of contact for GenAI and ML initiatives
• Translate business workflows into scalable technical designs
• Support stakeholder and client discussions requiring deep technical context
• Ensure alignment between upstream data sources and downstream AI consumption
• Leverage and extend existing AWS and Databricks infrastructure for GenAI workloads
• Integrate vector databases, orchestration frameworks, and ML platforms into a cohesive stack
• Establish monitoring, logging, and alerting AI pipelines, cost, latency, and quality
• Promote secure, compliant, and cost‑aware engineering practices
• Mentor engineers and analysts through design reviews, code reviews, and technical guidance
• Support onboarding and skill development for GenAI and ML capabilities
• Foster a collaborative, high‑ownership engineering culture
• Identify opportunities to simplify, automate, and modernize AI systems
• Evaluate new GenAI tools, models, and platforms and recommend adoption when appropriate
• Contribute to documentation, knowledge sharing, and long‑term technical roadmap planning

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, data engineering, or platform development
• Proven ability to lead technical initiatives end to end
• Hands‑on experience shipping GenAI / LLM‑powered applications
• Strong understanding of RAG architectures
  , prompt engineering, and…